This first volume of Tennessee Williams' collected letters begins with a letter from eight-year-old Tennessee to his mother and progresses through a youth that meandered through various universities and false starts until he began to find his voice. It ends with the unexpected and fabulous Broadway success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945.

"There is no artifice to these letters, no calculation, no awareness of posterity looking over the shoulder. What there is, instead, is a revelation of the author's creative process, an unedited outpouring of Williams' mind and heart and—perhaps most wonderfully!—the sound of his voice, for he wrote these letters as he spoke.... You cannot read these letters without hearing Tennessee speaking them."—Edward Albee